HUMANITIES 
GONE AND TO COME 



AN ADDRESS 



Felix E. Schelling 



AD ASTRA : AN ODE 



Francis Howard Williams 



Read before the 

Phi Beta Kappa Society, Delta of Pennsylvania 

at Houston Hall 

The University of Pennsylvania 



June i8, 1902 



HUMANITIES 
GONE AND TO COME 



AN ADDRESS 



Felix E. Schelling 



AD ASTRA: AN ODE 



Francis Howard Williams 



Read before the 

Phi Beta Kappa Society, Delta of Pennsylvania 

at Houston Hall 

The University of Pennsylvania 

June i8, 1902 



U C \o\\ 



^"^«' 



p. 

20F'04 



HUMANITIES, GONE AND TO COME. 



Mr. Chairman, Fellow-Members of Phi Beta Kappa, Ladies 
and Gentlemen: 

Nearly five generations of men have come and gone since 
this society sprang into Hfe ; its purpose the nurture and en- 
couragement of hberal studies by a public recognition of 
those whose young steps have begun worthily to tread the 
pathways of the humanities. The idols that men rear and 
worship change as men change. And time sheds tears or 
bestows mockery on the broken images of the ideals that 
have been but are no more. No symbol that has roused the 
spirit of human devotion is a thing wholly unworthy or with- 
out its significance. It is of some of these idols in educa- 
tion, fallen or yet upright, that I wish briefly to speak to 
you this afternoon. And I wish especially to dwell on the 
spirit that reared them on their pedestals and brought them 
honest devotees, rather than to dilate on the iconoclasm that 
shattered their beauties in indiscriminate destruction. 

Retrospect is the privilege of age ; prophecy the foible of 
youth, I can lay claim to your indulgence for neither. 
The present is only a passing link in the swiftly running 
chain of time. It rivets the eye but for a moment. He that 
neglects the past neglects that which has made him what he 
is. He that neglects the promises and the warnings of the 
present as to things to come, as to things which he may 
help to shape in their coming, is already floating, a mere 
piece of wreckage on the ocean of time. 

The humanities, the liberal arts : I suppose that these 
words call up to the minds of many of us, who are not 
wholly unlettered, a thing in some manner connected with 
the study of the classics, a something opposed to science 
and to the study of nature, a something very impractical 

(3) 



and very desirable to possess, if you do not lose bread and 
butter by it; a thing much talked of at commencements, and 
happily, for the most part, forgotten meanwhile. Indeed, 
the popular conception of the humanities is not unlike an 
Eton boy's knowledge of Latin and Greek, not so much a 
definite conception as an ineffaceable impression that there 
really are such tongues, and that it is a very disagreeable 
thing to have much to do with them. The humanities ! the 
very term is redolent of times long gone and smacking of 
generations before the last. Beside glittering, new-minted 
epithets like "sociology," "criminology," and "degeneracy," 
the very word "humanities" looks dim and faded in this new 
century which has entered upon its run with the gathered 
momentum of a hundred years of effort behind it. 

No word is constant in its significance ; nor is the expres- 
sion, "the humanities," an exception to this rule. The hu- 
manities, "those studies which involve the mental cultiva- 
tion befitting a man," have varied with the ideal of man- 
hood ; and the man of one age, derided and misunderstood, 
has often become the caricature of the next. In the Europe 
of the fourteenth century the idea of "humanity" was habitu- 
ally contrasted with that of divinity; and "the humanities" 
were conceived of as constituting the body of secular 
learning as distinguished from theological erudition. In 
that conception of manhood which transmuted each full- 
grown male into a miniature steel fortress, bristling with 
weapons and offence, cherishing his honor, his lady and his 
life supereminently as things to fight for, the humanities 
could be nothing if they were not unclerical. What had 
chanting priests to do with the graces of courtly young man-' 
hood, any more than they had to do with the exercise of arms 
or with the grand menage of horses of war? But though 
this ideal was unclerical, it harked backward to the classics ; 
for whether it was in the songs of the courts of love, in 
the romances of chivalrous King Arthur, the Cid or Charle- 
magne, in protracted discourses on morals, or the calami- 
ties that had befallen great heroes, the ancients were recog- 



nized as the only source of that sweet but profane learning 
wherein the heathen world of old had excelled and to the 
charm of which all subsequent ages have been fain to sub- 
scribe. Hence the arts and graces which dignified life and 
made it beautiful — poetry, music, and the knowledge of 
tongues, especially the classical tongues, — came, with the Re- 
naissance, to be recognized as the studies which involved the 
mental and aesthetic cultivation most properly befitting a 
man. And, however far the violence and barbarism of the 
earlier middle ages may have frustrated these ideals from a 
realization measurably full, their bare existence tended not 
a little to the amelioration of the social conditions of those 
times. 

As the world emerged into the greater stability of modem 
political life, while adhering as yet to much of the antique 
charm and picturesqueness of the medieval times, it was to 
this ideal of cultivated manhood that Sir Philip Sidney con- 
formed. Among the cares of war, of colonization and state- 
craft, in assiduous attendance upon an incomparable, but 
variable and exacting, Queen, Sidney none the less found 
time to cultivate the humanities in the practice of poetry 
after the manner of the ancients as well as in the ardent 
modem Italian way, in the composition of chivalric and pas- 
toral romance and in the discussion with his friends of Aris- 
totelian poetics and Machiavellian polity. The paragon of 
social and political graces, the generous patron of learning, 
the rare poet and passionate lover, the courtly and chivalrous 
gentleman, the man of simple and unblemished loyalty and 
faith, — all of these was Sidney, adored as the example and 
the idol of his time. And Sidney was so adored because of 
the perfection with which he fulfilled the Renaissance ideal of 
the humanities in their effect on vigorous young English 
manhood. 

In the sweeping revisions and restatements to which Lord 
Bacon submitted all the formulas of his age, the humanities 
"by no means escaped. Neglecting historical significance and 
current popular notions alike. Bacon retained the contrast 



between human and divine learning and, by a simple return 
to roots, defined the humanities as human philosophy : 
"Which hath," to use his words, "two parts. The one con- 
sidereth man segregate or distributively, the other congre- 
gate or in society. Humanity consisteth of knowledges 
which respect the body and of knowledges which respect the 
mind." (Advancement of Learning, Bacon's Works, Ed. 
1 84 1, II. 201.) In modern parlance it is anatomy, psychol- 
ogy, and what is now somewhat vaguely called "sociology," 
which Bacon considered as the threefold humanities or studies 
appertaining to man; and the last "sociology" (if I may 
venture again on the use of so disputed a term), Bacon could 
have conceived only in the logical sense in which it embraces 
all study of language, literature, history, politics, archseology 
and art. We may thus accredit to Bacon a remarkable 
widening of the earlier conception of the humanities and 
ascribe to him as well the earliest recognition of science as 
among them. 

With the coming of the eighteenth century the conception 
of the humanities had undergone another transformation. 
The century opened with the smoke of a momentous contro- 
versy rolling heavily to windward. This discussion con- 
cerned the relative merits of ancient and modern learning. 
Sir William Temple had just succeeded in proving to his 
own complete satisfaction that the ancients were really the 
superior poets. To the achievement of this result he was 
compelled, wittingly or innocently, to omit any mention of 
the names of Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Cal- 
deron, Moliere, or IMilton. Temple, moreover, enthusiasti- 
cally praised several Greek writers whose works it may be 
more than suspected he could not read. Years later, Oliver 
Goldsmith addressed the world in his "Enquiry Into the 
Present State of Polite Learning in Europe," an inquiry for 
which that delightful essayist and dramatist was fitted chiefly 
by his triumphant completion of a protracted career of idle- 
ness pursued at at least three of the most learned universities 
of the British Islands and the continent. 



There were good scholars in the England of the eighteenth 
century, but the cultivator of the amenities of literature felt 
that an apology was due the world for his aberrations from 
the practical highways of life. The great poet, Gray, pre- 
ferred anonymity to any repute that might come to him as 
the author of his famous "Elegy Written in a Country 
Churchyard ;" and Horace Walpole concealed the authorship 
of his novel, "The Castle of Otranto," as if it were a flagrant 
offence for a gentleman to sully his hand with the penning of 
romance. Indeed, the age which produced such artistic 
trivialities, such delicate articles of vertu as the letters of 
this same Horace Walpole or that impeccable code social 
for the guidance of youth by my Lord Chesterfield, his 
"Letters," equally artistic and equally fragile — surely such 
an age could have little need to emphasize the antithesis 
between "the humanities" and divine learning. But the 
eighteenth century had its distinctions none the less, and 
was painfully careful to construct an impenetrable barrier 
between such knowledge as might be presumed to adhere, 
like clay, to vulgar, everyday mankind, and the finer humani- 
ties which could appertain to fastidious gentility alone. "A 
cad, my son," said an eighteenth century father, in reply to 
a question as to the habitat and earmarks of that common 
and unpleasing variety of the human species, "a cad, my 
son, is a man whose Latin quantities are out at heel. Beware 
of him." Such was the shibboleth of that age. The word 
"humanity" had come to mean "polite learning," not the 
studies which involve the mental cultivation befitting a man, 
but, emphatically and avowedly, those studies which involve 
the mental cultivation supposedly appropriate to the fine 
gentleman. 

In England the superstition is still cherished that if a 
young man be carefully trained to pass a competitive exami- 
nation, winning from his fellows in Catullus or in the frag- 
ments of the obscurer Greek lyrists, he may somehow prove 
in time the better ruler for Punjab or Sindh. This super- 
stition — and is it wholly a superstition ? — is based in part on 



8 

a sentiment that the gentleman, after all, is very good ma- 
terial with which to begin. It is the gentleman ordinarily, 
and not the cad, who has had alike the leisure and, what is 
far more important, the temper to study Catullus, or the dis- 
position to expend leisure time on the Greek fragments. And 
it is the man, after all, that has been developed by these 
impractical studies ; and, with the man, those lesser things, 
the gentleman and the potential governor of Punjab or 
Sindh. Nay, is it in any wise superstitious to believe, in 
England or elsewhere, that a sword is best whetted on that 
which it is destined never to cut ? and that without the neces- 
sary preliminaries of whetting, pointing, and tempering, 
many a pretty thrust and trick of swordsmanship must prove 
in the end but vain ? 

The earliest American college was conceived as a school 
preparatory to the study of divinity ; for few save the intend- 
ing clergy could spare the time to acquire learning, on its 
face a thing so unimperative to the needs of everyday colo- 
nial life. As time went on it was felt that the languages of 
Greece and Rome had a value besides their use as lights 
wherewith to search the Scriptures. With the example of 
English education before them, with men who had come to 
the new world with the learning, the habits, and the preju- 
dices of the universities of England and Scotland, the Ameri- 
can college set up its ideal of the humanities, and in so doing 
naturally interpreted the liberal arts to mean primarily the 
classics, often the classics alone. 

This ideal has abided despite many attacks, if somewhat 
battered of late; and it has shown throughout the period of 
its maintenance the mingled strength and weakness that dis- 
tinguishes a principle nearly, but not quite wholly, true. 
There is little need that I should rehearse to you — who 
know it so well — the strength of that ideal which upholds 
the advantages of a classical education ; or tell how we may 
claim that no modern tongue can afford in its organic struc- 
ture the discipline of Latin and Greek, in which, in the words 
3f John Stuart Mill, "every sentence is a lesson in logic." 



Nor need I tell how we. can view no modern language with 
the completeness with which we can view these tongues of 
the past, or with the certainty as to the stability of the scien- 
tific facts which they present; how the literature of the 
ancients, especially that of Greece, affords us unequaled 
examples of the perfection and harmony of literary art, and 
may as soon be omitted from the study of the student of 
general literature as antique sculpture may be omitted from 
the study of art; or how in the study of ancient philosophy 
we travel back, so to speak, along those rays of light that 
have illumined the world for twenty-three centuries to that 
Greek prism, the crystal sides of which are Socrates, Plato, 
and Aristotle, that centre of light wherein lies focused the 
concentrated radiance of all human learning. These things 
are known to most of us and acknowledged by all except 
those in whom ignorance or want of opportunity has bred 
contempt for what they have not, or those whom the life- 
sapping blight of hand-to-mouth utilitarianism has stricken 
deaf and blind, but unhappily not dumb. 

The opponents of classical studies, if not of the humani- 
ties in a larger sense, have been for the most part two ; first, 
the exponents of the superior advantages which they claim 
for a purely scientific education, and, secondly, the utili- 
tarians. Who can deny the force of the enticing appeal that 
bids us return to nature and read in the spacious volume 
which she lavishly spreads before us year after year the 
absorbing story of this visible world? Even the demand, 
sometimes made in the past, that scientific studies be sub- 
stituted all but wholly for the older humanities might be in 
a measure excused from that natural and creditable zeal 
which is born of the fervor of propaganda. Indeed, the 
demands of these reformers were often not more unreason- 
able than the replies of men blindly adherent to the traditions 
of a system of education antiquated and no longer effective. 
But this warfare is now a thing of the past. No one now 
denies the value, even the imperative need, for science as an 
integral part of the education of the day; just as few any 



10 

long-er refuse to recognize the liberalizing influences of the 
study of our own and of foreign modern tongues. There is 
no weakness in a strenuous advocacy of a study of the 
classics ; there is much unwisdom in claiming for the classics 
alone that liberalizing influence which they possess in so 
high a degree, but which they share with many other studies. 
There is positive falsity in the position which some have 
taken, the attitude of opposition to the study of science ; and 
there is absolute injustice in the denial of the liberalizing 
capabilities of a study of the sciences liberally conducted. 
No subject to which man can give his studious attention, no 
subject wherein a man may discover truth to add by his dis- 
covery to the sum of human knowledge or to create there- 
with newer and juster views than those which obtained 
before, should be denied a place among the humanities. But 
the subject must be pursued with that disinterestedness, that 
freedom from ulterior motives of practical utility, which 
alone can permit a free play of its liberalizing elements. It 
is their practical uselessness which has given and will con- 
tinue to give to the classics, with pure mathematics, jesthet- 
ics, and philosophy, a palpable advantage over the sciences 
and modern languages among the humanities. In a word, 
the measure of the educational value of the humanities lies 
in their practical inutility. A sword is best whetted on that 
which it is destined never to cut. 

And now that this battle is won and science has taken her 
place beside her sister, the arts, in administering that cultiva- 
tion which is befitting the man, we begin to recognize to the 
full the value of this broader conception of the humanities. 
We have learned that neither our arts nor our young bach- 
elors are constant quantities to be combined with the inevit- 
able result of the union of two chemical elements. We have 
learned that men may be liberalized by the mathematics and 
biology and remain illiberal in the atrium of Greek poetry 
or among the arcana of ancient philosophy. We have 
learned, in short, that men can no more be educated after one 
pattern than fitted on a single last ; that neither the chival- 



11 

rous type of Sidney, the virtuosity of Walpolc, nor the cleri- 
cal cut of old New England can suffice for all ages and cli- 
mates, but that age strides after age and that our ideals in 
education, like our ideals in all things else, need adaptation 
to present needs and the exercise of a wise but conservative 
foresight for the future. Indeed, in the recognition of all 
this we may now well pause to inquire if the habit of change 
has not grown inveterate upon us and if, in our zeal to fit 
the individual at the present moment, we have not lost sight 
of his own future development and of the relations of each 
to all. 

The present is no moment for supine self-congratulation. 
The humanities to-day are front to front with an attack in 
comparison with which all previous menaces sink into insig- 
nificance itself. We have no longer to fight for the study of 
Greek or to relegate to her proper place the exorbitant claims 
of the youngest and boldest of the sciences. We are in 
struggle for the very principle of liberality in education 
itself, and, worst of all, our enemy is within, and is often a 
neighbor or a brother. Practical utility is by far the most 
insidious enemy of modern education and the chiefest barrier 
to the attainment of that higher intellectual and spiritual life 
toward which the nobler members of the race are striving. 
And by utility here I mean not that broad and philosophical 
outlook which recognizes the ultimate value and potency of 
all things human by the completeness and success with which 
each performs its function in life ; but that cheap reckoning 
up of commercial values, that near-sighted and niggardly 
view of man and life in the light of petty immediate gains, 
that reduction of things, both human and divine, to monetary 
standards which paralyzes liberal and disinterested endeavor 
and fills our learned professions — save the mark! — with 
expert but narrow and unlettered men. Utility in education 
demands that we hurry our boys into the professional schools 
before they are ready for college, or thrust them through or 
out of college before they are old enough to appreciate their 
advantages. Utility demands that we interlard the humani- 



12 

ties Avith technical and professional work by turning as many- 
studies as possible into their practical applications. Utility 
demands devices of short cuts and special courses and the 
invention of specific courses which it is hoped may prove 
alluring to the uncultured and the uninformed. In short, 
utility in education destroys the very ideal for which the uni- 
versity was created and transforms the institution in which 
it becomes a ruling incentive from the leader and guide of 
the community at large into a submissive follower in the 
wake of a degenerating public opinion. 

The excellence of American technical and professional 
schools is our glory and our pride. Where ingenuity, adap- 
tability, technical aptitude and energy which tires not nor is 
daunted are in demand, American technical education need 
yield to none. If American lawyers are at times a little 
less grave in their learning, they are more agile in their 
thought than their cousins across the water; if Ameri- 
can divines are less frequently historians and philoso- 
phers than British divines, if American diplomacy is some- 
what more rough and ready, and a trifle less successful 
in -finesse, nay even though not quite all the scientific dis- 
coveries, from the circulation of the blood to the Roentgen 
rays and wireless telegraphy, have been made in America, 
we can have yet nothing but pride for the learning, the skill, 
the success, and the firm and resistless forward tread of 
those who grace the learned professions in America. But 
if our professions are to advance, nay if they are to continue 
what they are, depend upon it that an increasing technical 
standard, a course of greater length, more laboratories and 
minuter specialization cannot alone accomplish it. More 
important than all these things, more important than specific 
qualifications, are the temper of mind, the outlook of the 
student entering upon professional studies, and the attitude 
which he takes toward his chosen career. This attitude is 
the product of school and college life, and is acquired by 
subtle influences which build up character or undermine it. 
If the golden calf of utility is worshiped in the class-room 



13 

as well as in the streets, and perhaps even in the family, the 
student's attitude will become that of the alert and active 
devotee of that philosophy whose mandate is, "Succeed!" 
Such a man may reach in later life a certain worldly 
success, but he will remain in all essentials a professional 
quack and an influence working, according to his power, 
more or less for evil. If, on the other hand, the liberalizing 
power of the humanities, be their content what it may, has 
been exerted to the full upon him, the young professional 
student will appreciate his responsibilities as well as his 
capabilities, and holding both as a sacred trust, live a power 
among his fellow-men working for good. Our concern is 
first with the man. The man once made, all else will follow. 
We are sometimes told that the moral tone of the uni- 
versity is lower than that of the outside world, that the 
mingled restraints and freedom of college life, nay, even the 
pursuit of learning itself, make not for righteousness, nor 
probity, nor ideal conduct. The logic of such doctrine as 
this is the abolition of learning. Far better were it that these 
walls should stand for all time a blackened ruin than that 
they should foster the school of iniquity and degradation 
which such a notion infers. That young men, a large part 
of whose daily life consists in the honest fulfillment of the 
allotted task, that men habitually in contact with refined, dis- 
ciplined, and trained minds, in touch with the best that is 
known and thought and filled with the ideals which the 
wisest who have lived before them have held up to the 
admiration of the world, should live by moral standards 
lower than those of the street, the mart of trade, or the polls, 
is an error gross and palpable. And yet it is not altogether 
inconceivable that were the humanities stricken from the 
curriculum of our colleges and learning cultivated solely for 
the worldly advancement and prosperity to be gained by it ; 
were this beloved university of ours — which Heaven forbid 
— to degenerate so far as to train mere politicians, mere 
quacks, and mere pettifoggers, such imaginings as these 
might not seem to us so wholly grotesque. Religion has no 



14 

such aid and abettor as the disinterested pursuit of learning. 
MoraHty has no closer ally than a liberal education. With- 
out education religion shrinks back into primitive supersti- 
tion. Without education morality fades like a dying ember 
blown into momentary glow by brute terror of the law. 

I confess that I view with deep concern the increasingly 
practical bias which is given to our everyday education, and 
the invasion of the college and even of the secondary school 
by subjects into which an alleged or actual utility enters to 
the detriment of their liberalizing power. I confess that I 
view with mistrust the enormous emphasis which we attach 
to facts statistically juggled ; the undue weight which we 
give to speculative theories untested by competent knowl- 
edge of past speculative thought; as I view with alarm the 
minuter specialization of subject matter in college and uni- 
versity, when intrusted, as it sometimes is, to men to whom 
the humanities in any sense are a dim recollection of the sec- 
ondary school. It is for you, my younger brothers of Phi 
Beta Kappa, to recognize some of these things, and recog- 
nizing their nature, to stand firm for that openness of spirit, 
that quality of disinterestedness, that elevation of thought, 
and that unquenchable faith in high ideals which is the most 
precious outcome of your sojourn with the humanities. 

I respect the ingenious application of scientific principles 
to matter that trains our engineers, our chemists, and our 
physicists to mechanical skill and technical precision. I 
admire the nice complexities of applied science, and pro- 
cedure perfected by experience and precedent, which we call, 
respectively, the professions of medicine and of law, and, 
which train competent guardians of our property, our rights, 
and our lives. I honor the patient and indefatigable spirit 
of research that wins for men, inch by inch, new lands in 
the territory of the unknown. And I bow before that abnega- 
tion of self that lives for the spiritual welfare of men and 
offers with brotherly hand the consolation and the stay 
which religion alone can give. But I do maintain withal that 
it is in the untechnical studies, the unprofessional studies, be 



15 

their content, let me say once more, what it may ; it is in those 
studies alone which are pursued without the possibility of 
transmutation into terms of practical utility that we can hope 
to find the elements which draw forth the undeveloped man 
within, which set forth lofty and unselfish ideals, and which, 
in a word, do really educate, elevate, and humanize. 

When James Russell Lowell defined a university as a place 
in which nothing useful was taught, he uttered no mere idle 
paradox. I am afraid that we are doing a great deal of use- 
ful work in this university, work which has its place here, 
but work which should not be permitted to usurp all places. 
The greatest need in the education of to-day, a need greater 
than short cuts to the professions, training for city councils 
or state legislatures, preliminary courses to speculative phi- 
lanthropy or air-ship building, is the restoration of the 
humanities to our college courses in a larger proportion than 
has been theirs for many a day. Where the line is to be 
drawn which shall divide the training of the man from the 
training of the engineer, the lawyer, or the physician is a 
matter comparatively unimportant. That such a line should 
be drawn is an imperative need of the moment, a need which 
temporizing can only make more clamorous in its just 
demand. 

Among the humanities that are with us or are to come, 
let us welcome every subject that can enlarge the horizon of 
the student and give him truer, saner, and more liberal views 
of man and life. It is not the topic which determines these 
qualities, but the spirit in which the subject is pursued, a 
spirit which demands a rigorous exclusion from its purview 
of all that is narrow and material. In a frank recognition 
of the liberalizing influences of the study of science and of 
the close relations of modem languages, history, and philo- 
sophical speculation to the development of the contempo- 
rary man, I cannot but affirm it as my conviction that the 
languages of the ancients, their art, literature, philosophy, 
and archaeology, will long continue the most fruitful of the 
humanities, not only because of their valuable content and 



16 

their incomparable position as to all that has come after, but 
because of their splendid isolation from the possibility of 
measurement and appraisement by utilitarian standards. 
Depend upon it that the sword is best whetted on that which 
it is destined never to cut. Depend upon it that the true 
glory of the humanities, whether gone, present, or to come, — 
like the glory of art, of literature, and the glory of religion 
itself, — is the immeasurability of all these priceless things by 
material standards, their spiritual worth, significance, and 
potency. 



AD ASTRA: AN ODE. 
I. 

Once more the gentle bonds of fellowship 
Draw hearts to closer union and inspire 

Our lives to service and our lips to song; 
Once more the lyre 
Leans patient to the fingers as they slip 
Idly amid the unawaken'd throng 
Of melodies instinct of living fire, 

Symmetric, strong, 
And seeking utterance of divine desire. 
Foregathered at the shrine of that Fair One — 
Child of a stately mother — here we bring 
Love and the joy of life and gratitude — 
Elated, sing 

Of Alma Mater's venerable years 
Enfolded in serene beatitude, 
And of the beauty of her daughter's face 
Bearing Athena's bays upon her brow ; 
Here, eager to endow 
Dull speech with music, chant in unison 

The hymn which adoration sanctifies. 
Greeting the mother's calm perennial grace, 

Greeting the daughter's maiden smiles and tears, 
Unknowing where the deeper rapture lies — 
To touch with reverent hand the wintered hair, 
Or kiss the shadows 'neath those April eyes. 
Thus as we stand 
Upon the upland, and our foreheads bare 
To the new morning's breath 
Waking to verdure all the nourishing land, 
Far through the unneighbored spaces of the air 
We seem to see, 

Prophetically, the defeat of death. 
And hear the cry of immortality! 

in) 



18 

11. 

Down the hushed aisles of sleep, 
Dimly perceived by that deep spiritual vision 
Wherethrough alone the ultimate truth is known, 
Troop mystic figures from the fields Elysian — 

A choric throng whose sandalled footfalls keep 
Time to the rhythm of being, and we are shown 

The pathway leading upward to the stars. 
For though amid the seething and the strife 

And all the clash and clangor of the marts 
We gird our loins for action, yet our life 

Lies like an island in a sea of dreams. 
And only that is real which imparts 
Profoundest sense of unreality. 
The thing which seems 
Is not the thing which is, and haply bars 
A beatific sight from eyes that fain would see. 

Is it some whisper from the infinite shore 

That fires us with a faculty sublime? 
Is it the echo of the distant roar 

Of questioning waves upon the marge of Time? 
We do but know that immortality 

Thrills the responsive lute-strings of the soul, 
And feeling upward through the dark to find 

Solution of impending mystery. 
We lift adoring eyes, that once were blind, 

As sudden from the clouds which backward roll 
A vast apocalypse illumines the mind, 
And we are free ! 



If through eternity we are to be. 

Shall we not grasp the fullness of the whole. 
Completing the fair circle? Not with death 
Shall come destruction ; wherefore then with birth 



19 

Cometh creation? Nay, the vital breath, 
Kindhng to music these dull lips of earth. 

Breaks to the bud and blossom of a song. 
And in exultant measure loud and long 
Chants the majestic everlasting Now, 

Lifts to the stars this seeming-mortal clod. 
Prints on man's pale and melancholy brow 
The seal and superscription of a god ! 

III. 

Once more the unrelenting cycle cleaves 
The little orbit of our lives, and we. 
Half ready to be gone, reluctantly ^^^^^^-"''''''^ 
Scan Time's worn volume, turning ^JcftTthe leaves 
Which hold the record of the garnered sheaves. 
The fruitage of men's actions. Not in vain 
Is any deed wrought out to perfectness, 
Nor any pain 

Endured in silence and with fortitude. 
Nor any thought evolved amid the stress 

And onward rush of an unpausing flight. 
The men who snatch the lightning from the sky 
To turn the wheels of trade, the men who bear 

Fate's bitter chastisements, the men who brood 
Beneath the brooding forehead of the night, — 
Alike do share 
In that result which makes for righteousness, — 
That last effect which is felicity. 

For though existence be but ebb and flow, 
A dower divine dwells in that ocean vast. 

Each tide that laves the beach doth higher go, 
All aspiration leads to heaven at last. 

And through the pulse and passion of our lives, 
Which mock the narrower wisdom of the schools, 



20 

Wc feel the large vibration of the spheres; 

And in humanity's deep-throbbing heart 
Our chastened ears 

List to the promise of a nobler art 
Too fine to feel the chains of iron rules, — 
Too great to wear the gyves 
Of gray tradition grown most tyrannous! 
He only fears 

The spectre of the ages who hath lost 
The ages' mightiest bequest to us, — 

Belief in selfhood, knowledge of the cost 
Of keeping souls of men and peoples free. 



IV. 

And thou, fair Land, forever grown more dear, 
Forever blessing more abundantly, 
How shall we fitting homage render thee 
Or bring our gifts more near? 
Down the perspective of the greatening year 

We seem to see thee struggling to the light, — 
We seem to hear. 

As 'twere amid still voices of the night. 
Thy clarion call outringing cold and clear : 

"Onward and upward ! there are foes to fight; 
Upward and onward ! there is God to fear." 
And whether regal in thy martial guise 
Or weeping at thy stricken chieftain's bier. 
The sunlight ever dwelling in thine eyes 
Fashions Hope's rainbow in thine every tear. 

Protagonist in Freedom's holy cause! 
Teach us the lessons of thy great emprise ; 
Bring swift release 
From all the bigotries and hates of war ; 
Thy healing bring 



21 

To hurt hearts hungering- for thy ministries ; 
Give ear and answer to our questioning, 
And to our spirits peace. 
Yet evermore 
Graft in our bosoms that grim patriot faith 
That will not falter at a task begun 
Though all a world in arms should bid us pause, 
• — Though foes at home should bid us leave undone 
The work evolved through everlasting laws, 
And seek to terrify us with the wraith 
Of murdered precedent. Beneath the sun 
There is no power to mangle or to mar 
The outcome of stern destiny's decree, 

No power beneath the sun to filch one star 
From that bright flag which stands for liberty ! 



Patient and pauseless be the onward urge 

Of men grown conscious of divinity; 
Up to the summits ! mindless of the scourge 

Which ever threatens him who would be free. 
Revere Convention, but be not her slave; 

Bow to the past, but bid the future hail ; 
Keep green the grasses on each hallowed grave, 
But dare the lightnings, so the truth prevail ! 
Listen at Nature's lips. 
Her secret learn, 

Nor ever, grown imperious, come to spurn 
The offer of her myriad comradeships ; 
She ever hath 
Some new delight for each life's brightening, 
Some goal to which each spirit may aspire. 
Some love to give for sweet love's heightening,- 
An aftermath 
Of joy for each desire. 



22 

The reticent night holds all her gifts of stars 

For him who breathes her amplitudes of air, 

And on her breast the lily moon doth wear 
Like a celestial flower. No canker mars 

Where only beauty dwells eternally 

And even sadness blooms into a joy; 
So he who seeks the gold in earth's alloy 
Oft finds the germ of right in seeming wrong, — 

Loves best the music in life's minor key, — 
Turns from the cadences of Helen's song 

To list the sighs of sad Andromache. 
Thus striving, thus believing, we attain 

The empyrean, and the human cry 
Swells to a song divine, and man's domain 

Circles the lucent glory of the sky. 



YK > 



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